passed in the 16th of Charles I., when his parliament wrung a number of those guarantees from him, authorised the sheriffs to issue writs for an election after any parliament had ceased to sit three years, if the government did not summon one, and in default of the sheriffs issuing such writs, the people might assemble and proceed to election without.
The government wanted to be rid of this act, and therefore the duke of Buckingham set Gere, sheriff of Yorkshire, and others, to send incendiarians amongst the people to excite them to proceedings of this sort. They were then arrested to the amount of about fifty persons in Yorkshire and Westmoreland, on the plea that they were assembled without lawful cause, the parliament so far from having ceased to sit three years, being still sitting. The ignorant people had been probably purposely misinformed, and some of them were hanged for it. The end of Charles was gained. He told the parliament that the act thus encouraged seditious meetings, and that though he never wished to be without a parliament for three years, he was resolved never to allow of a parliament summoned by such means as prescribed by that act. The parliament readily repealed the act, and passed another, still requiring a parliament at furthest after three years' interval, but sweeping away what Charles called the "wonderful clauses" of the bill.
In return for this favour, the commons now solicited his assent to the conventicle act, which it was hoped would extinguish dissent altogether. This was a continuation of those tyrannic acts which were passed in this infamous reign, some of which, as the corporation and test acts, even survived the revolution of 1688, and have cost us so much trouble in our own time to get rid of. The test act, the act of uniformity, by which bishop Sheldon, the Laud of his time, ejected two thousand ministers, now the conventicle, and soon after this the five mile act, completed the code of despotism, and opened up a scene of violence and persecution such as no country in the worst times ever saw surpassed.
Here was this king, who, in the last session of parliament, published his declaration for the indulgence of tender consciences, now wheeling round like a weathercock, and consenting to this conventicle act. And what was this act? It forbade more than five persons to meet together for worship, except that worship was according to the common prayer. All magistrates were empowered to levy ten pounds on the ministers, five pounds on every hearer, and twenty pounds on the house where this conventicle, as it was called, was held. This for the first offence, or three months' imprisonment, and ten pounds a hearer or six months' imprisonment for a second offence; one hundred pounds a hearer or seven years' transportation for the third; and death without benefit of clergy in case of return or escape. This diabolical act Clarendon, the just and wise Clarendon, applauded, and says that if rigorously executed, it would have produced entire conformity. What were Clarendon's idea of rigour?
Sheldon, the bishop of London, let loose all the myrmidons of the law on the devoted country. The housed of nonconformists were invaded by informers, constable, and the vilest and lowest rabble of their assailants. They broke open the houses of all nonconformists, in search of offenders, but still more in search of plunder; they drove them from their meetings with soldiery, and thrust them into prisons—and such prisons! No language can describe the horrors and vileness of the pestiferous prisons of those days.
The two thousand nonconformist ministers were starving.
"Their wives and children," says Baxter, "had neither house nor home." Such as dared to preach in fields and private houses were dragged to those horrible prisons: those who ventured to offer them food or shelter, if discovered, were treated the same. To prevent the nonconformist ministers even remaining amongst their old friends, Sheldon, the very next session, procured the five mile act, which restrained all ministers from coming within five mile of any place where they had exercised their ministry, and from teaching school, under a penalty of forty pounds for each offence.
"The conventicle act," says Lingard, "affected equally catholics and all denominations of dissenters; but it was felt the most severely by the quakers, because, while others, when they met for the purpose of worship, sought to elude detection, these religionists, under the guidance, as they thought, of the Spirit of God, deemed it their duty to assemble openly, and to set at defiance the law of man."
This is true, and the relation of the tremendous persecution of the quakers, which never ceased till the revolution, a period of twenty-four years, has scarcely a parallel in history, and is the more disgraceful, because these people had a principle of non-resistance, except such as consisted in passive endurance, and which exhibited the conduct of their persecutors as cowardly in the extreme. No less than two thousand five hundred of these peaceable people were, according to "Bess's Sufferings of the Society of Friends," in prison at once; "and during their absence the informers and constables came and plundered their wives and children. They threw away the food of infants, and carried away the very vessels. They frightened and abused the poor women and their children; put the key of the door in their pockets, so that they and their tribe had free ingress and egress night and day; and there they eat, drank, and caroused jovially, declaring that they would eat of the best, drink of the sweetest, and those rogues of quakers should pay for all." When they complained to archbishop Bancroft of such vile fellows, he only replied that "it required crooked timbers to build a ship."
But the tale of these monstrosities fill two thick folio volumes, containing upwards of one thousand four hundred closely printed pages. They detail every imaginable species of outrage and insult, petty vexations, and agonising sufferings; confinement in the pestilential dungeons of the time, such as the hulk in Newgate, which was the death of numbers; every species of legal and illegal plunder, loss of estate, friends, liberty, and life itself. In London they filled the prisons in suffocating crowds, where in 1662 twenty died, and seven more soon after their liberation; in the present year, 1664, twenty-five more, and in the following year fifty-two others. In the whole kingdom three hundred
